When Warren arrives on the scene, Leone’s husband, Brian Darby, lies dead on the kitchen floor, shot three times with her service revolver. A badly beaten Leone appears to have been the victim of domestic violence. But where is Leone’s 6-year-old daughter, Sophie?

Warren and her one-time lover and current partner, Massachusetts State Police detective Bobby Dodge, begin a frantic search for Sophie, but each new clue seems to complicate — rather than clarify — her mysterious disappearance. Why was Darby spending so much time bulking up at the gym in his final months? Did he fear some unknown enemy? Is Leone a battered wife and child killer, or innocent of murdering her husband and a loving mother as desperate as Warren and Dodge to find her daughter?

Gardner, whose meticulous research into true crime and the dark side of human nature characterizes her best-selling and award-winning novels, leads the reader on a breathless search until the final pages.Jean Graham is a freelance writer from Brookside.